Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [125]
Apart from this serviceable livery he had bought no new clothes that she had seen, except for a good purse and low boots, which he was wearing. To his friends, this was merely old Claes, the walking dish-rag. To the eye of Marian de Charetty, it was the fruit of a conscious decision: a signal of non-aggression to smooth his passing return to the herd. She could imagine Felix’s reaction, if Claes had returned in the latest Milanese fashion.
She wondered if Claes ever longed for these things, and decided that he didn’t. Or hadn’t, so far. If he did, it would be some woman, no doubt, who would teach him. The little serving-girl Mabelie had taken up with John Bonkle – so Felix had let slip. And Felix himself, she was fairly sure, had found a girl of the same sort. She could not deal with that. Julius, so good in many ways, had failed her too in this respect. And it was one of the few areas where pride would not let Felix learn from Claes.
Did youths grow out of these wayward passions? Would the pretty face in the hedgerow always tempt them, up to and after the time when good sense said that they must found a family, or old age would find them with nothing? At what age did a man come to himself, and see that he must have security? Perhaps, for some men, it never happened.
Her home was empty. As Cornelis’s wife, she would have kept open house for his friends, while the young went out in their carnival clothes and passed the night in undisclosed pleasures. A widow, she had already accepted the hospitality of the other dyers: she did not want, a widow, to join them in their houses this evening as one of the older generation, Cornelis’s generation, which was not hers. She did not want, either, to join the throng in the market place, the throng of couples, of lovers, as a mother, a widow, a chaperone. But to stay in, alone, was not pleasant.
So she was surprised and delighted when, an hour or two after nightfall, a servant came to her door from the Adorne family, requesting her company at the Hôtel Jerusalem for the evening. The young people, said the servant, had all left, and the demoiselle Margriet had thought she might be alone, and free to join them until her daughters returned. Or, indeed, to stay overnight should it please her.
She asked the servant to wait while she prepared herself quickly and, locking and double-locking her doors, left the house to her porter. Then she stepped into the familiar street, and took time to pause for a moment. Beside her, the Adorne servant stopped too, obediently, his torch in his hand. But tonight, there was no need of light. The snow had vanished, except as a sparkling design upon buildings, tinted peach and rose and lilac and leaf-colour by the paper lanterns that clustered like birds by windows, doorways, walls and corbels in every street.
Tonight every gate-lamp was lit, and the corner niches with their holy statues shone bright and tended. And so, in answer, did all the towers and spires of the churches, outlined tonight in twinkling candle-lamps against the black, icy sky. The street, even here away from the centre, was crowded with thickly-cloaked, rosy people, and, somewhere, she could hear music.
Marian de Charetty stepped out. The night, which had promised nothing, now promised companionship. At the very least.
Under the same magical sky the former apprentice called Claes was entertaining, with artistry, a number of disparate young whose attendants knew less about children than he did. He had the sheer delight of the lanterns to help him. They walked about, their faces upturned. From the hump of each bridge, with its painted statues, its branched lights, its evergreen, they looked down on a fairyland reflected in water. The canals were tinselled like ribbons, and so were the children’s faces, catching the light from them.
But then, after